All posts tagged: Ernest Wan

Hong Kong Sinfonietta 香港小交響樂團

Concert Hall, Hong Kong City Hall /Hong Kong / May 17, 2025 /Ernest Wan / Among the offerings of this year’s French May Arts Festival was a concert from the Hong Kong Sinfonietta, Trio Wanderer Plays Beethoven Triple Concerto. It was memorable, however, neither for the acclaimed chamber ensemble from France nor for the great German composer’s work but for the Czech guest conductor Tomáš Netopil’s rendition of the other, equally buoyant works on the programme, both written by his countrymen. Like the Beethoven work it preceded, Bohuslav Martinů’s seven-minute Overture H 345 (1953) is in bright C major and is sometimes redolent of a baroque concerto grosso. Under Netopil’s assured baton, the orchestra filled the auditorium with a warm glow of sound from the first bars, and the music, with its insistent succession of 16th notes and chains of syncopated string figures, chugged its way at a healthy clip to a firm conclusion. The Sinfonietta was joined in the Beethoven concerto (1804) by Trio Wanderer, whose members, says the official bio, are known for …

NOĒMA樂季

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Auditorium, Tsuen Wan Town Hall /Hong Kong /Jan 11, 2025 /Ernest Wan / Founded by Sanders Lau as recently as 2022, NOĒMA has already taken to calling itself “Hong Kong’s leading chamber choir” – and indeed, with its programmes in this 2024/25 season of numerous serious and challenging works, it puts other local choral groups in the shade. It had a slightly different line-up of singers for each of its past concerts, and for its recent performance at Tsuen Wan Town Hall, it comprised four sopranos and three each of altos, tenors and basses. Among them were four members of the renowned British choir Tenebrae — one of each voice type — who in the days before the concert had shared with the other performers their expertise in the British 20th-century a cappella music that constituted that evening’s programme. The evening opened with John Tavener’s The Lamb (1982), a simple setting of William Blake’s famous Songs of Innocence. This served as a gentle warm-up for the choir, producing a sense of rapt wonderment. In the …

Bayerische Staatsoper 巴伐利亞國立歌劇院

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Ariadne auf Naxos /Grand Theatre, Hong Kong Cultural Centre /Hong Kong /Feb 22, 2024 /Ernest Wan / This year’s Hong Kong Arts Festival officially opened with the Bayerische Staatsoper’s Ariadne auf Naxos, Richard Strauss’s opera, in its 1916 version. There was concern that Hongkongers might not warm to the spareness of Robert Carsen’s 2008 production. However, judging from the enthusiastic audience response, such concern seems to have been unnecessary, so engaging was the bustle in the first part of the work and so riveting the steadily sustained momentum in the second. In the opera-within-an-opera of this second part, the desert island of Naxos on which the princess Ariadne has been deserted was an empty stage in utter darkness. As the young god Bacchus emerged and at the end ascended with her to the heavens, light emanated through an ever-widening upstage slit and eventually engulfed the entire stage. Few objects other than dance mirrors were used for the set of even the first part, which shows onstage the frantic backstage preparations for the drama of the …

Bamberg Symphony

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Concert Hall, Hong Kong Cultural Centre / Hong Kong / March 18, 2023 / Ernest Wan Formed mainly by German orchestral musicians in Prague who were forced after the Second World War to leave Czechoslovakia and settle in the Bavarian town of Bamberg, the Bamberg Symphony, with its Czech chief conductor Jakub Hrůša, recently appeared at the Hong Kong Arts Festival. It performed a repertoire at which, with its history, audiences expect it to excel: symphonies by Antonín Dvořák and Johannes Brahms, as well as music by the Hungarian György Ligeti, whose 100th anniversary is celebrated this year. The first of the orchestra’s two concerts began with Dvořák’s New World Symphony in E minor (1893), his ninth and last work in the genre. The lower strings’ doleful playing of the soft opening melody and the fierce, incisive fortissimoattacks soon after in the slow introduction were illustrative of the far-reaching emotional landscape to be traversed. While the Largo was scenic and deeply felt as expected, with characterful woodwind solos and delicate sustained string harmonies, even accompanying …

Kit Armstrong

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Grand Hall, Lee Shau Kee Lecture Centre / University of Hong Kong / Hong Kong / Dec 11, 2022 / Ernest Wan / For his debut recital in Hong Kong, 30-year-old pianist and composer Kit Armstrong presented a programme that, at first glance, seemed a mere attempt at maximum eclecticism, consisting as it does of music ranging from that of the Renaissance all the way to that of our own time, indeed of Armstrong’s own invention. As his softly spoken introduction revealed, however, the first half of the programme comprises works by composers of an “Apollonian” disposition, the earliest of them being William Byrd, whereas the second half spotlights more personal, subjective utterances, the earliest from John Bull. Byrd and Bull were both “Jacobethan” composers whose pieces for virginals, according to Armstrong, created the world of solo keyboard music as we know it. His longstanding conviction that this four-century-old music works on the modern piano is amply borne out by his playing. While the listener could easily imagine a performance on the harpsichord of Byrd’s …

Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra

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Concert Hall, Hong Kong Cultural Centre / Hong Kong / Jun 11, 2022 / Ernest Wan / In the programme of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra’s César Franck at 200 concert, it is baffling to see, amid a pair of works by the French composer born two centuries ago in what is today Belgium, the utterly irrelevant Viola Concerto by the Hungarian Béla Bartók. This is especially odd considering that just the previous month the orchestra presented an all-Felix Mendelssohn programme, even though it never mentioned the 175th anniversary of the composer’s death; and that just last year it was engaged by another organisation to play not one but two programmes devoted exclusively to music by Camille Saint-Saëns, marking his death a century before. That said, anyone who manages for a moment to refrain from pondering the context ought to feel grateful that the Bartók concerto gets performed at all. The composer left only sketches when he died in 1945, from which his former student Tibor Serly put together what would for decades remain the …

Various artists

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Threading Through Time / The Mills / Hong Kong / Jan 10–19, 2020 / Ernest Wan / Completed in late 2018, the revitalisation of the three remaining factories of Nan Fung Cotton Mills pays tribute to the industrial past of Hong Kong, once a leader in global yarn production. Jockey Club New Arts Power recently presented a series of installations and 45-minute performances at several locations within this complex of buildings in Tsuen Wan, now a hip attraction known simply as The Mills. For the project, Threading Through Time, participating artists had been asked to respond to The Memory of Herbs, a newly commissioned short story by Chan Wai that chronicles a woman’s career as a textile worker and, implicitly, celebrates Hongkongers’ can-do spirit over half a century. The three installations that make up Kay Chan’s Literary Walk are straightforward. One of them, situated on bridges connecting two buildings, consists of panels on which excerpts from the short story are displayed, and vintage telephones through whose handsets a recording of such excerpts is played back with background music by Fung …

Sebastian Fagerlund 施巴斯坦‧費格倫特

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Höstsonaten / Grand Theatre, Hong Kong Cultural Centre / Hong Kong / Oct 18–19, 2019 / Ernest Wan / Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s Höstsonaten (Autumn Sonata, 1978) made its way to the operatic stage two years ago, when a two-act opera of the same title, with a screenplay-turned-libretto by Gunilla Hemming and a score for solo singers, choir and full orchestra by Sebastian Fagerlund – both Finns who regularly work in the Swedish language – was produced in Helsinki. This production was recently presented in Hong Kong by the government’s World Cultures Festival, of which this year’s theme was The Nordics. On this occasion, the music was performed by the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, the Malmö Opera Chorus and a cast of Scandinavian soloists, under the leadership of Swedish conductor Patrik Ringborg. The story tells of the unhappy reunion between Eva, who lives with her husband Viktor in his vicarage, and her visiting mother Charlotte, a successful touring pianist whom she has not seen for seven years. Charlotte’s egotistical pursuits have resulted in a long-standing neglect of …

Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra

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Concert Hall, Hong Kong / Cultural Centre / Hong Kong / Jun 29, 2019 / Ernest Wan / Near the end of this 45th anniversary season of the Hong Kong Philharmonic, audiences were treated to a Finnish programme, performed by Finnish guest artists, that included the local premiere of the acclaimed Clarinet Concerto (2002) by prominent composer Magnus Lindberg. Notwithstanding the characteristically sophisticated musical language, the Concerto is eminently accessible. It begins and ends in unambiguous, life-affirming C major, with a folk-like opening melody that recurs several times like an anchor of stability amid more changeable material. The orchestra, led by Osmo Vänskä, featured a large battery of percussion instruments and produced a diverse range of enchanting colours, with solo clarinetist Kari Kriikku’s many tremolo passages adding much to the often shimmering effect. He had worked closely with the composer on the Concerto and given its first performance, and it was a marvel that he played almost non-stop in this 28-minute work with apparent ease, overcoming one hurdle after another along the way, from seemingly endless series of arpeggios to passages employing advanced techniques such as multiphonics …

São Paulo Symphony Orchestra

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Concert Hall / Hong Kong Cultural Centre / Feb 21, 2019 / Ernest Wan / This year’s Hong Kong Arts Festival opened with the local debut of Brazil’s São Paulo Symphony Orchestra and the US’s Marin Alsop, in her final season as its music director. Four works that are completely unrelated to one another made up the concert programme, presumably a showcase for the versatility of both orchestra and conductor. The tactic would have been more successful had the selection of works been better thought out. Prokofiev’s light, cheery neoclassical First Symphony (1917) began the concert and fared best, with various details clearly audible, thanks to the fine orchestral balance and the moderate tempi employed in all four movements. But the third of these, a gavotte, suffered from very mannered ritardandi on the upbeats, which greatly impeded the flow of the dance rhythm, a problem that was to resurface later in the evening. Next was Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 1 (1810s), with mainland China’s Ning Feng joining in as the soloist. His confidence in his mastery of the dazzling range …